This review seeks to evaluate the book Storytelling in Daily Life by Langellier and Peterson.
This book presents an analysis of storytelling as a communication practice. The authors analyze stories collected from the field to show how they conform to and resist common understandings of what storytelling is, does, and means.
This review finds that the book will be engaging for communications scholars and others interested in critical theoretical approaches to storytelling.
Provides a synopsis of the theoretical approach, topics, and audience for this book, pointing out its value for those interested in academic approaches to storytelling.
Kristin M. Langellier (a nom de plume for Mark and Marcia Bailey) and Eric Peterson explore the communicative powers and cultural nuances of everyday stories in Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing Narrative. Their purpose is to “develop a theory of performing narrative […] in order to understand the storytelling that surrounds us in daily life...” and argue for approaching storytelling as a communication practice (Langellier and Peterson, 2004, p. 4). The book is organized in three sections, the first opening with analysis of stories told on a group trip which introduces the communications concepts that serve as their primary analytic toolkit. The second section considers a range of stories told within the small group cultures of several Franco‐American families, emphasizing both family culture and ethnic cultural elements. These cultural elements include differing individual and family group relationships to French language, food, and cultural events. Langellier and Peterson present stories in thematic groups, considering issues of generational distinctions, gendered storytelling roles, cultural identification in person‐to‐group relations, and other cultural boundaries. Meticulous analysis of both content and verbal delivery in everyday settings afford readers a more complex understanding of how these stories operate in context than is evident from transcriptions alone. For example, in analyzing a story told by a family group including a mother, father, and daughter, the authors use the concept of “task‐ordering” to analyze who initiates the story (father) and how others support the telling (mother and daughter) through their interjections.
The third section broadens and fragments the storytelling scope, tackling weblogs as storytelling sites, one woman's story of struggle against (and ultimately her death from) breast cancer, and analyzing performance art as storytelling. In chapter 5, “Storytelling in a Weblog”, the authors take two essays by Walter Benjamin as their point of departure, considering weblog journal entries as emphasizing “the particular and the personal” (Langellier and Peterson, 2004, p. 176). They make an apt analogy between the cultural work of the microphone, which allows everyday voices to be heard by a large audience, and the personal qualities of the weblog, which allow individual voices access to be broadcast and “heard” more widely. Chapter 5 shows how weblogs can and should be included in normative definitions of storytelling, albeit with differences from storytelling in physical presence, including more explicit struggles over social identities in a disorienting online framework. Chapter 6 presents a breast cancer story from an individual who did not survive, and whose storytelling during her struggles resists self‐identification either as hero or victim. This story stands in opposition to more typical survivors' “closure” narratives, which emphasize heroic triumph over adversity. Chapter 7 explores a single six‐minute autobiographical performance, raising questions of identity and ambiguities of meaning that prevent narrative closure.
The range of settings, from family stories to performance art, is too wide for generalizations about how storytelling functions, and that is not the intent of the authors. Instead, this volume seeks to explore storytelling as a means of troubling underlying assumptions about what storytelling itself means, to “question or problematize the taken‐for‐granted habits and institutions of performing narrative” (p. 5). For instance, they seek to disrupt the assumption that storytelling must be face‐to‐face through their analysis of weblog stories. Their analytic framework draws on the theoretical works of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Walter Benjamin, and the cascade of parallels between critical theorists and stories the authors have collected is occasionally a bit unwieldy to unpack. At times, the authors overemphasize parallels to the writings of critical theorists, overshadowing their own conclusions.
However, their analyses of daily narrative are incisive and illuminating, and because of the accessibility of the stories themselves, scholars from other disciplines are invited along for the ride. Langellier and Peterson present compelling investigations of the relation of various modes of storytelling communication to the unspoken norms operating in each context. The careful parsing, describing, and sifting through narrative acts and elements is engaging reading for those interested in academic approaches to understanding storytelling. Indeed, the authors are careful to point out that their own academic analysis is but another story, as situated and particular a communication practice as the stories they analyze. Although those seeking to apply or improve storytelling in daily life may be mislead by the title, those looking for a theoretical understanding of storytelling will not be disappointed. Communications scholars in particular will find this book useful in placing storytelling solidly within the purview of their own field, as a communication practice.
